GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[Kode-Z]

Anyone know why Rare changed Joanna's face for the Japanese market?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMfGyTLUA_w&NR=1

[Dragonsbrethren]

Probably just an attempt to make it sell a bit better there. FPS games generally don't go over very well in Japan, they may have thought having a Japanese protagonist would boost sales a bit.

[Kode-Z]

That would make sense.

I wonder if SubDrag has the face texture/head model for the Japanese version of Joanna? I can't remember seeing it in the PD Face Mapper.

[Dragonsbrethren]

I've never played the Japanese version of PD before (either that for I've forgotten this stuff, that seems unlikely though), there have been some interesting changes:


The N64 logo turns into a blood red Pd instead of silver like the NA/EU release.



The Japanese titlescreen, a lot flashier than the one we're used to.



Cutscene subtitles are enabled by default, which makes sense since the voiceovers are still in English. I really expected them to dub them into Japanese, with all of the other changes made to the game.


These doors have an odd texture on them. Probably just a plugin issue, everything else was normal.
Edit: Playing a second time, they were fine.



When you approach the PC you get a hint to press the B button.



Same with elevators. Also, Carrington walks to the opposite elevator he does in the NA release, which means there's a bit of backtracking on both floors.



I don't know what happened, but Carrington's last two lines displayed garbage...



...and it also affected the Perfect Menu.
Edit: This seems to be a plugin issue too, it happened again almost immediately after starting Defection. The English text is not affected.

I'll try some actual missions later, though I expect those to be unchanged.

Last edited by Dragonsbrethren on Sat Jun 13, 2009 3:17 pm; edited 1 time in total

[Kode-Z]

Interesting... I like the look of the red N64 logo!

Apparently, the Japanese version was easier in some missions than the US/EU versions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-W-gWTQq4g

[Dragonsbrethren]

Oh man, I would kill for some of those shields in the US release. It always seemed like they sacrificed gameplay for story on Perfect Agent (it doesn't make sense to just leave shields laying all over the place, ignoring the other two difficulties). I wish they had both body armor and shields; the model for the armor was used for Defection's shield at one point.

Edit: We should try extracting the setups from the Japanese version, the text calls will need to be changed but luckily those have already been documented. I don't know how to go about extracting them but if anyone else does, send them over, and I'll see about making them use the existing English text.

Last edited by Dragonsbrethren on Sat Jun 13, 2009 3:58 pm; edited 3 times in total

[Kode-Z]

Did you notice the different start weapon for Attack Ship? In the PAL/NTSC you start with the combat knife, and in the Japanese version, you start with the Falcon!

[Dragonsbrethren]

Heh, yeah, those Skedar weren't on the top of their game that day...

[Kode-Z]

I'm sure there's plenty more minor similarities to find, probably in multiplayer too!

[HackBond]

On the subject of changes in PD, The PAL PD has no Intro Music
_________________
Also known as Spyster or Nyxem
[Youtube]

[Decoy] Antenna | Control | Silo | Escape

[Dragonsbrethren]

Interesting. Another thing I noticed is that enabling hi-res mode seems to put the PAL version into a 16:9 screen resolution, even without 16:9 selected. Is this how it actually behaves on the console or just an emulation oddity? In the NTSC versions it just doubles the resolution.

[radorn]

HackBond wrote:

On the subject of changes in PD, The PAL PD has no Intro Music

What do you mean there's no intro music in PAL PD?
I'm confused, I have PAL PD and I'm not missing music anywhere. What are you talking about exactly?

Dragonsbrethren wrote:

Another thing I noticed is that enabling hi-res mode seems to put the PAL version into a 16:9 screen resolution, even without 16:9 selected.

Are you sure about that?
On screen menus get compressed horizontally to fit pixel per pixel the higher resolution, but the game's aspect ratio is not affected.
Didn't that happen in NTSC too?

[HackBond]

radorn wrote:

What do you mean there's no intro music in PAL PD? I'm confused, I have PAL PD and I'm not missing music anywhere. What are you talking about exactly?

The Intro screen showing the intro cinema for the 1st PD level, the music is missing
_________________
Also known as Spyster or Nyxem
[Youtube]

[Decoy] Antenna | Control | Silo | Escape

[Dragonsbrethren]

radorn wrote:

Are you sure about that? On screen menus get compressed horizontally to fit pixel per pixel the higher resolution, but the game's aspect ratio is not affected. Didn't that happen in NTSC too?

I just saw the menus, thought I left 16:9 on (I was testing to see if I could run the game in widescreen in windowed mode, not yet, but it'll be in a future version of Glide64), and noticed it was hi-res mode causing it. I don't think I even took notice to the rest of the game. Anyway, no, that doesn't happen in the NTSC version, the menus stay the same size.

[radorn]

Elevator and computer terminal usage "tips" are also present in the PAL release.

About the highres mode changing menu's width, there are two possible explanations.
One is that it is an improvement over NTSC to make fonts and menus look better under the new resolution. I can't try the NTSC game on console, so I can verify this, but, for those of you who do, could it be that menus and hud elements present rescaling artifacts unther either high or normal resolution modes?
Additionally, the PAL release's various languages containing special characters could suffer more severely from this.
JAP release doesn't resize menus under high resolution, but that doesn't necessarily break my theory if we take into account the complexity Japanese kanji, that could get very difficult to read if they were too tiny, specially on a TV CRT (kana are much simpler, but japanese characters are all the same size, so they have to be as big as kanjis need to be to be readable, even if a smaller size would suffice for them alone).

And, Hackbond, you are right about the musicless intro in PAL... it's quite odd, though.

Another thing I'm rather interested in, but that would need to be checked on real hardware (if that upcoming flashcard by neoflash, by chance, allows so without messing things up), is that all western versions of PD are numbered 8.7 (final), and jap is 8.9 (final), and, in my pc, it seems a slight bit faster... Wonder if they managed to optimize it a bit more.

That kind of stuff seems to happen a lot in Rare's games for N64, improvements and bug fixes present in some versions and not in others... it's a bit unfair.
Which reminds me how in NTSC GE there's a bug affecting mines, that, if you plant more than six and make them explode, only the first 6 really do and the rest just disappear, while PAL version keeps them and explodes them in batches of six (of course, there's a limit to how many explosives you can plant, and if you exceed it, all your mines disappear without even exploding)
I would like if further PD hacking would be based on the PAL release, since it has support for multiple languages ready, among other possible improvements.
GE hacking is already too advanced with the NTSC version to switch to PAL now, though...